Three pieces of news today(well, really 2) that are worth mentioning. First is that the SEC declared Ethereum “not a security” and as such the price of ETH went up 10% or more immediately because it may now face lessened scrutiny and regulations. The reason is pretty hilarious though. It was because they couldn’t find evidence that “people obtained ETH for the purpose of making money.” Yes, technically that is true, ETH is supposed to be a network token used for making transactions on the Ehtereum Network but realistically people buy and hold any coin or token(including ETH) for the purpose of selling later for more money. This announcement may be favorable to any ERC 20 tokens since Ethereum is no longer considered a security, the rest of them may also not be considered securities. I’ve always thought it was nonsense that the SEC could regulate something as a security while the IRS taxed it as property.
The second big piece of news is that overstock has stated that it prefers crypto payments over credit card payments in large part because they have to deal less with chargebacks(which you can’t do in Crypto) and refunds when accepting payment in cryptocurrency. This may be a signal for more retailers in the future to start accepting crypto in order to avoid the hassle and cost associated with credit cards and could become a gateway for crypto to go mainstream.
Third Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald Trump, has said that he wants to get into crypto because whoever controls currency controls everything. This, of course, defeats the main purpose of crypto as it was created to be decentralized so no one person or institution could seize power over it. However, I doubt even if Bannon and all his white nationalist friends pooled their money together, they don’t have enough to buy a large percent of the crypto market so for now its a nothingburger.